The Twilight Zone, S1E12, "What You Need"

Opening: You’re looking at Mr. Fred Renard, who carries on his shoulder a chip the size of the national debt. This is a sour man, a friendless man, a lonely man, a grasping, compulsive, nervous man. This is a man who has lived thirty-six undistinguished, meaningless, pointless, failure-laden years and who at this moment looks for an escape—any escape, any way, anything, anybody—to get out of the rut. And this little old man is just what Mr. Renard is waiting for.

“What You Need,” like “One for the Angels,” is an ode to the people who live small-scale lives and practice ordinary, small-scale kindnesses. Both stories even focus on a low-level salesman confronted with the seeming certainty of death. But Lew Bookman and Ernest Truex’s¹ Pedott are very different figures, and for all the similarities in how their episodes are constructed, their stories take them in very different directions.

One crucial difference is that Lew Bookman—avuncular and gregarious—sells gewgaws, toys, and frivolities; he saves a child’s life by sucking Mr. Death into his pitch and convincing him to buy trinkets he doesn’t actually need. It’s a playful episode where flash is your friend. In contrast, “What You Need” has a shadowy and shabby world, and then it finds the kindness and decency that creates light in it. Pedott’s goods are humble—a bottle of cleaning fluid, a comb, a leaky fountain pen—and his customers are all wearily skeptical adults. Since we learn he makes repeat visits to the same bar, we can guess he responds to its lonely, melancholy, down-on-their-luck clientele.

This bar scene makes the episode for me. It establishes both Pedott’s warm sympathy for people and his gift, which is a quiet and peculiar kind of magic: he knows what people will need before they need it. He’s happy to offer someone shoelaces or matches, but sometimes when he looks at them, his expression turns thoughtful, and he offers them a small item free of charge: “It’s what you need.” I like to think that he doesn’t always know exactly why they’ll need it, that he’s not predicting the future in detail as much as he’s sensing some promising relationship between his customer and one of the profoundly ordinary items in his case. He knows what he can do to help people right now with what he has, and that’s a skill we could all use.

He also has an obvious conscience about how he employs it: you sell your wares, but you give your help away for free. You don’t charge someone for what they really need.

We see a sample of his magic with Lefty (Read Morgan), a washed-up baseball pitcher with a bad arm, and an unnamed, lonely young woman (Arline Sax²—T’Pring!) who looks fragile and brittle as she huddles in her coat. Pedott gives the young woman a small bottle of cleaning fluid, and she takes it silently, responding to his somber earnestness in insisting that it’s what she needs. Lefty, meanwhile, is looking for his “baseball career at the bottom of a bottle.” Pedott gently prods him to consider alternatives—“There are things instead”—and then identifies what Lefty really needs: a bus ticket to Scranton, Pennsylvania.³

All the time, Renard (Steve Cochran⁴) is in the background—a sulking, watchful thundercloud on the edge of our perception. Pedott gives him a wide berth. The bartender is cynical and mean, too obviously enjoying prodding at Lefty, but Pedott doesn’t avoid him in the same way; he’s a jerk but not dangerous. Renard is a blood clot in the social ecosystem, an aneurysm waiting to happen.

When Lefty gets the phone call offering him a job, I appreciate that it’s not a glamorous, lucrative position: there’s nothing about it that suggests he’s back on top. He’ll be coaching a minor league baseball club in Scranton … but he’s on cloud nine about it, because it’s a sudden ray of hope and purpose in a life he thought would never see those things again. It’s a way to still be part of the game. He goes from a grimy, depressed low to an ordinarily happy high, and it’s lovely to see. Morgan does a great job with Lefty’s almost stunned excitement as he ponders a shave and wishes he had another sports jacket, one that didn’t have a spot on it. And of course that’s when the young woman floats toward him, bottle shyly extended, her loneliness turned suddenly ethereal.

She dabs at his jacket. “Now, when this dries, you won’t even have a spot there.” He looks at her, lovestruck: “I was lucky you were around.” This all takes up maybe five minutes of the episode, but it’s a permanent part of my brain now.

Unfortunately, it’s also a permanent part of Renard’s, and all he’s taking from it is that Pedott can give him what he needs. He looms and leers, threatening to “spread [Pedott] all over the street” if the pair of scissors Pedott gives him isn’t really what he needs. When he gets back to his hotel, his scarf gets caught in the elevator door and chokes him, and he’s able to use the scissors to cut himself free—but while he’s relieved, he isn’t grateful. He can’t be grateful, he can’t be happy, and he can’t be satisfied. And once he forces Pedott into an unwanted and one-sided partnership, Renard gets both greedier and more menacing.

This is one of the best episodes for demonstrating the show’s moral framework. Pedott has a great gift, but while Renard harshly dismisses him as a “dummy” for “dribbling away [his talent] on nickels and dimes,” Pedott views the simplicity of his life as a moral necessity. Using it to amass power or wealth would be a perversion of something good—something that is naturally directed toward helping others.

Renard can’t see any part of that. He’s hungry for more, and he doesn’t care what anyone else gets. In fact, one of the most damning details about him is that even when he’s temporarily flush with money and success—when Pedott’s leaky fountain pen has picked a winning horse for him and he’s collected the cash—he still doesn’t tip the bellhop for bringing him the paper. (In contrast, way back in “Walking Distance,” Martin, unhappy though he may be, is a good tipper who’s capable of apologizing when he’s crossed the line. I feel like Rod Serling evaluates people’s goodness partly on whether or not they tip, and I think that’s entirely legitimate.)

In the end, Renard needs more help than Pedott could possibly supply. The things Pedott gives away are small and, as he points out, fundamentally disposable—“things you need, you only need once.” Sometimes, their use even depends on them being used up, depends on their recipient knowing when and how to use them. The gifts are a chance for a better life, or at least a better moment, and Renard has such a limited ability to seize on that. He wouldn’t be inspired by a job offer from a minor league team, and he wouldn’t see a chance for connection in offering to dab a spot off someone’s coat. Pedott tries to tell him that the items can’t fill up the profound, bottomless emptiness Renard has inside him.

“The things you need most, I can’t supply,” Pedott says. What are those things? “Serenity, peace of mind, humor. The ability to laugh at oneself. Those are the things you need most, but it’s beyond my power to give them to you.”

Renard ignores all of this. To him, Pedott isn’t a person, he’s also just something Renard needs—a kind of vending machine to dispense wonders. He takes the shoebox Pedott’s eyes keep darting towards, and in doing that—in taking the box even when Pedott tells him not to—he seals his fate.

This is the clumsiest part of the episode. Pedott admitting that the shoes are actually what he needs is enough for us to understand how and why their slippery soles would lead to Renard’s death; we don’t need Pedott to spell it out to us. It’s awkward enough that it almost feels like a network-required justification, as if Pedott has to explain that he took this role in Renard’s death only out of a desperate need for self-defense.

I actually prefer to think that his reasoning is more muddled and complicated than that. Yes, Renard was a grasping, dangerous man, exactly the kind of person who would kill the goose that laid the golden egg, and he was already harassing and threatening Pedott. But he was also corrupting Pedott’s gift, turning the dispensing of small but sometimes crucial mercies into something selfish and sordid—and I can see Pedott killing him for that, too. He said earlier that he must use his gift sparingly, and I think that’s because he can see that anything more could potentially turn even the most well-intentioned person into a monster. He can’t let Renard drag him in that direction.

The little coda gets us right back to Pedott’s raison d’être, giving him a chance to dispense a comb to a rumpled man in a bathrobe—a gift that allows the man to tidy himself up before he has his picture in the paper. These are the small pleasures that matter.

Closing: Street scene, night. Traffic accident. Victim named Fred Renard, gentleman with a sour face to whom contentment came with difficulty. Fred Renard, who took all that was needed—in The Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Alvin Ganzer

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: The Four of Us Are Dying

1. We’ll see him again in “Kick the Can.” He never had a huge screen career, but he got steady work. I’ve seen him in Bachelor Mother and His Girl Friday, for example … and most recently in The Trouble with Harry, where he played the manhandled, shuffled-about corpse himself. I hope Hitch let him keep the painting of himself from that one. ↩︎
2. Also known as Arlene Martel. We’ll see here again in a memorable role in the creepy “Twenty-Two.” ↩︎
3. I do wonder how that wound up with Pedott in the first place. Everything else he offers up feels more authentically part of his shabby set of goods, but this is more specific than that. But maybe I just don’t know that much about peddlers and their wares. In any case, I’ve seen this episode multiple times and this is the first time this has ever occurred to me, and ultimately I love this scene so much that I don’t care. ↩︎
4. He had a small role in one of my favorite movies of all time, The Best Years of Our Lives; he has a large body of work, mostly as some kind of heel (White Heat, for example). Unfortunately, while a lot of on-screen heels are consummate gentlemen in real life, Cochran was anything but: the story of his death alone is enough to make that clear. Fascinating but nightmarish reading. ↩︎